Recently, with the development of the image recognition techniques, there is an increasing interest in the techniques for analyzing the position relation between nerve fiber bundles and lesions imaged in medical images.
Many brain diseases will affect the deformation of the white matter fiber, e.g., may cause deformations such as blocked, infiltration or extrusion. Knowledge of these changing can provide a neurosurgery with useful information. In particular, with respect to the situation of infiltration, the excision extent is closely related to the prognosis. In fact, highly invasive lesions will largely change the morphology, and will harm the function of the infiltrated white matter fiber, but low invasive tumors may only extrude the surrounding brain tissues. These different situations will affect the formulation of the surgery strategy. Therefore, by accurately determining the position relation between white matter fibers of different functions and the lesions, it can help to find an optimal compromise between the excision extent of tissues and retaining the brain functions as far as possible.
When a physician makes a plan for a tumor surgery, it is needed to discriminate the functions of associated nerve fiber bundles. Tracking of the nerve fiber bundles can provide such information.
In prior arts, methods of discriminating the function of nerve fiber bundles have disclosed. A method of discriminating nerve fiber bundle functions is disclosed in prior art, e.g., in patent document 1, it disclosed first determining the nerve fiber bundles that traverse a lesion, and then determining the arrival points in the brain region of the nerve fiber bundles that traverse the lesion, utilizing a template of cerebral cortex functional area to determine the functional area of the cerebral cortex that is in connection with the arrival points of the nerve fiber bundles, thereby predicting possible influences to the subject.
However, this analysis method can be only used to detect the affected fiber bundles that traverse the lesion, and cannot detect the affected fiber bundles that are extruded but do not traverse the lesion. Furthermore, utilizing this analysis method can only demonstrate the connection between the fiber bundles and the cerebral cortex functional areas and predict the functional categories of the affected fiber bundles, but cannot extract and display the actual morphology and position of the affected fiber bundles.
Moreover, prior document 2 discloses a method of extracting nerve fiber bundles, which conducts a logical calculation between a set of nerve fiber bundles extracted by a nerve fiber bundle tracker and a set of nerve fiber bundles selected based on the region of interest (ROI, sometimes referred as “seed region”) of the nerve fiber bundles, so as to determine a set of certain nerve fiber bundles. This set is a set of fiber bundles that traverse a certain region of interest and exceed a threshold in terms of anisotropy, but the set of these fiber bundles is only correlated in position and is not correlated in function, and it is thus unable to obtain the functional categories of the fiber bundles while extracting the fiber bundles.
Moreover, in prior arts, it is generally to obtain the region of interest from the result of blood oxygen level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging (BOLD-fMRI) and thereby to track the fiber bundles. This does not only need to obtain the result of blood oxygen level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging, but is also not easy to obtain high quality result of blood oxygen level dependent functional magnetic resonance imaging in practice.